Playable Worlds – technical designer Light Bates this time, not Raph Koster – has dished out another dev blog on Stars Reach’s pre-alpha playtest. You know, the playtest you’re probably not in.
“Our goal with this playtest was to test out World Simulation, both from a design perspective and from a technical one,” Bates writes. “On the design side, we wanted to see how long it takes for a world to look less like a tropical landscape and more like swiss cheese. And on the technical side, how well would the simulation keep up with two hours of constant mayhem all across the map? Spoilers: If you give nearly 100 players a suite of terraforming tools, they can carve up a planet pretty good.”
Bates explains that players went hard on digging into the world (as designed) and resculpting the landscape for resources, which caused some emergent behavior from the planet – like a big ol’ whirlpool and waterfall. Players also managed to carve the game’s name into the terrain and construct what we’ve unilaterally decided is a statue of Raph Koster. Ultimately, it sounds like the test was a success – as much for what it broke as for what worked perfectly.
“It wasn’t all smooth sailing. One of our goals was to test how well the simulation would handle the stress, and while the simulation held up pretty well the tools themselves had much more of an impact on the server than we’d expected, creating some nasty lag. This is the way the world ends, not with bang but with the roar of 80 simultaneous extractor beams. Fortunately, we were able to identify the problem pretty quickly and you can bet it’s a set of improvements that we’re working on now.”
Our most recent playtest was pretty destructive — and that's exactly what we needed. https://t.co/y028LQ9hH7 @PlayStarsReach
— Playable Worlds (@PlayableWorlds) September 18, 2024
